About
In 2003 an initiative was presented for the development of a series of clusters of detectors around Dutch academic institutions for the purpose of education and research. The High School Project on Astrophysics Research with Cosmics (HiSPARC) was born. Now, the initiative has over 150 detector stations across Europe. Based in Marling School, we are one of these stations. We have divided up in to two groups, which you can read about in their individual group pages, to do genuine research about topics we enjoy.
Contact
Marling School
Address
Marling School
Cainscross Road,
Stroud
Gloucestershire
GL5 4HE
Phone
Main school office:
01453 762251
6th form office:
01453 760156
Fax:
01453 756011
Cosmic Ray Explanation
The name "cosmic rays" can be quite misleading as they are not rays and in fact are fast moving charged particles originating from space.
When they hit the atmosphere they break down into smaller particles. The magnetic fields of
earth affects cosmic rays so they often spiral around the magnetic field close to the north and south poles.
When this happens, some of the particles ionise the atmosphere, which then recombine with electrons, causing light.
This causes a spiral of multi-coloured lights known as the aurorae which are the Aurora Borealis (The northern lights)
and the Aurora Australis (The south pole)
This picture shows how cosmic rays break down as they enter the atmosphere:
Muons are the only particles that reach ground level and as such are the ones we detect.
Further explanation of cosmic rays.
Pions
Pions are any one of these three subatomic particles:
π0 (Neutral), π+ (Positive) or π- (Negative)
They consist of a quark and an antiquark
Photons
Photons are elementary particles which are the main form of all electromagnetic radiation, including light.
Muons
Muons are elementary particles similar to electrons with a negative charge and a high mass.
How does the cosmic ray detector work?
The magic behind the detectors are the scintillating plates inside of them. The material they are made of creates a flash of light when it is hit by quick enough particles. The light intensity in dependent on the amount of energy given off by the charged particle. The light is picked up by a photomultiplier tube which turns it into a electrical signal. it is then stored on a program on the computer so we can analyse it. The number of particles that hit the detector per second is very high but, because we are only interested in the particles that come from a shower (therefore from the same cosmic ray breaking up), we use multiple plates (0.5m2 each) a few metres apart and make it a requirement that both plates must detect at the same time, as particles from the same shower arrive earth at almost the exact same time. By correlating and analysing the data from various stations, we can see showers that extend of hundreds of square kilometres.
Further Information
Nasa's cosmicopia
You can look at how we constructed our detector here.
You can see a more in depth description of how it works here.
You can have a look at the data we have gathered here
You can have a look at the data from all of the detectors around the world, shown in various forms, here.
Team A - Solar Weather
Members
Billy Harding
Jack Harrison
Laurence Dhonau
Ben Robinson
Tim Lewis
George Barber
What are we doing?
As a group we are looking for a link in the activity of solar weather, and the number of cosmic rays that reach Earth.
We are looking at data collected from our own detector as well as many others.
The first thing we did, in trying to determine a correlation between the bulk speed of solar wind and cosmic ray coincidences, was to see if there was a simple visual correlation between the data. We did this in Excel. It quickly became clear that this was impractical due to the fact that we were trying to compare the solar wind as an hourly average with every cosmic ray coincidence, which was very difficult logistically; Technical issues regarding the amount of data such as, taking far too long to copy columns, and a maximum column size of 2 million rows; and the data only being for one day at a time, meaning it is very slow to get the necessary amount of data.
We solved this problem by developing a python script that managed the data downloading and formatting, so we could simply copy this into Excel and determine a correlation using a graph.
As you can see, there is no clear correlation, and when further analysed, we found a correlation coefficient of only 0.0782171814.
We next analysed the data in another python script, and found that there was a huge statistical significance of up to 10 standard deviations. After repeating this test for multiple 3-month periods at different detectors, we can almost conclusively say that these results did not happen by coincidence.
We hope to later continue the research to find the relationship between these two sets of data.
You can get our research paper here
You can see the presentation made to the hisparc conference here
Team B - Ray Origins
Members
Tom Green
Will Taylor
Alex Walker
What are we doing?
As a group we are looking to see if we can track the origins of the solar rays. We are looking for coincidences across detectors across the world as well as our own and are calculating the angle of the rays, letting us find the origin.
We investigated potential sources of cosmic rays, using HiSPARC data.
We calculated the angles at which individual cosmic rays entered the Earth's atmosphere and used these to locate potential sources in space
The equations used to calculate the angles are unique and work in the ECEF coordinate system, allowing more than 3 detectors to be used for angle calculation.They were devised by Dr Michael McEllin
Data analysis has been done using a program developed by Tom Green, which calculates the angles of trajectories of incoming cosmic rays, in the hope that we will later be able to find a source. The demo program can be downloaded here
Raspberry Pi Cosmic Ray Detctor
One member of the team (Chris Digby) is altering code used to create a radiation detector with a raspberry pi to create a cosmic ray detector
He has successfully used a raspberry pi camera blacked out with electrical tape (to remove the detection of certain particles such as photons ), and advanced code based on the sample to detect cosmic rays. Initial tests are very positive and seem to show that the project is working in theory, and he is now working on refining the interface, noise reduction, and general useability
Site made and maintained by Billy Harding
Image credit Luke Peterson